The Northwest may be short on high summers, but our late summers or bright autumns are long and glorious. Sometime in late August, the heat lifts a little, and the sunset crawls back towards dinnertime, and the sun slants in the sky and turns everything golden. This is the heartbreak summer, where so many of the fruits of the earth are at their fullest and ripest, heavy sweet clusters hanging down full of sweet juice, and yet where even as all of this comes to fruition you know that the season is dying, is leaving and is falling down into the cold and decay of winter. Like so many a high school romance, you love it all the more because you know it can never last.
Every year around now, I am seized with the urge to line my nest, fill my pantry or stock my den for the winter. Gathering acorns, I find myself in an odd unity of purpose with the squirrels, and feel similarly frantic and flustered. Something in my blood knows the urgency of the harvest, both in its splendor and in the approach of winter. Tailltiu is long dead and buried. Time is running out on the year.
It's also a very pleasant time to spend at one's harvest. The days tend to be warm, mild and mostly dry. (And when they aren't dry, there will be mushrooms.) The air is crisp, and the leaves beginning to flame. One can spend long afternoons on foot or bicycle, gathering herbs and rosehips and berries from streamside, ditch and forest path. A trip to the store can stretch and be diverted for hours as I gather the wild food along my path, and below the knees and elbows I am usually covered with a fine net of scratches. There still is, it seems, a blood price extracted by the land.
Every year, I think, I learn something new. How was it that I never saw the stretches of wild roses along the semi-rural streets out by where we live before? I've gathered rosehips for years, but only in a few places, and I seem to remember they were hard to find. Now, everywhere I turn I see more of them, Nootka roses with their round ripe hips the size of children's marbles, or gymnocarpas, with their smaller, earlier hips, bald and often shaped like little chili peppers. Rugosas with hips the size of wild plums. This year I finally found a good stand of jewelweed, tall, translucent stalks standing breast high at the edge of a marsh. Since then I have found three more, bright with their orchid-like flowers of orange and red.
And then there are blackberries.
Blackberries are not new. When I was a toddler, I rode across much of the state on the back of my mother's bicycle and ate blackberries until my face, hands, and most of my possessions were stained purple. Blackberries are not unusual. You are lucky if your yard doesn't have blackberries, and oftentimes they are more foe than friend. One can't even be particularly proud of knowing about blackberries. People who turn up their noses at all other wild food, who wash their hands after touching mushrooms and have never taken stories of eating dandelion greens seriously, can recognize blackberries and have probably eaten a few, at least when they were young and didn't know any better.
It's easy to forget about, or scorn, blackberries. I've been told before that anyone who really gets excited about blackberries must be from out of town. I'm a fool. I almost forgot about them myself.
This year I was reminded of blackberries at that same stand of jewelweed. As I cut stalks to simmer in oil and by the addition of beeswax make a salve, the clusters of berries, only the first few of which had darkened into ripeness, cascaded over the low fence marking where the edge of the road fell away to mud, and dangled from the arching thorny canes. First one ended up in my mouth, and then another. And then we gathered them by the handful and filled small paper bags with some four pounds of them.
I've gathered most of the edible berries that grow wild in our region, many in fairly large quantities, and many that require a lot more effort to collect than do blackberries. What is easy to forget is that blackberries are one of the very best. Sweet, juicy, with a flavor strong enough to be distinctive but not so strong as to overwhelm, if they were rare there would be as much a religion around their cultivation as there is with tomatoes.
There are actually three varieties of blackberries locally. The one that takes over the most ground, and is probably plotting further incursions into your yard, is the Himalayan blackberry, an invasive non-native species, deliberately introduced early in the last century, apparently as a favor to all of us. (Gee, thanks.) Its spiky leaves that are cut inwards, following the pattern of the veins, distinguish the second, the cut-leafed blackberry. This too is an import, I believe, though a few guides claim it to be a native, and it is perhaps the preferred variety among lovers of blackberries. The third, the trailing blackberry, is a native species, similar in general form to the Himalayan, but generally smaller, with longer petaled flowers. You might have seen it, though likely not often.
They are all worth the effort, and worth even a few scratches.
Last week, driving home I stopped for a light and smelled from my car window the scent of blackberries, the scent of them growing, the scent of their sweet, overripe, fallen berries. I knew the smell before I saw them, something deep in the mind of my childhood, a fragrance that stitches together the years so that at that place, for that moment, a quarter of a century was only as long ago as yesterday. This is the fragrance of mud and abandoned places, of leaves falling and rotting, of thick dark canes covered with thorns sharp and curved as cat's claws. This is the fragrance of ripe fruit, fruit that trails on the ground, fruit from vines tangling about and choking a tree, hanging down in bunches like ripe grapes, staining your mouth redder and darker than blood. This is the fruit of the end of summer, of the purple sky, of the fading sun. Stain your fingers, fill your mouth, cook it down even further and darker, hide it away, and eat it in your lair during the winter to come.
This dish is easy and so delicious that a large one has yet to last a full day in our household of three. You can pick enough berries to make it in half an hour given a decent but not extraordinary patch. (I timed it.) You might consider hanging a bag or pail around your neck so both hands are free to pick, though I did not.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
At least 6 cups of blackberries (but if you have fewer, adjust the rest of the recipe downward accordingly)
1/4 c. flour or half as much arrowroot
1/2 c. brown sugar
Pick over the blackberries. Don't wash them, or you'll risk washing away much of the juice and flavor. You're going to bake them; anything untoward will be dealt with.
Add flour and sugar and mix, roughly, making sure you break a few of the berries in the process. Leave the mixture alone while you make the topping.
4 graham crackers, crushed
1/4 c. oats
3-4 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 stick (1/4 lb.) melted butter
Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Add melted butter. Mix. Can't get much easier than that. You can substitute a similar amount of dry cake crumbs or other crushed sweet crackers or biscuits for the graham crackers, if desired. You can also throw in another cracker or two and omit the oats.
Put the blackberry mixture into an appropriate baking dish. I use a small casserole, in which the blackberries form a layer about four inches deep. Sprinkle and spread the topping over the top. Bake for about an hour.
If you can wait, the texture will be best if the cobbler sits for about 20 minutes after you take it out of the oven. A scoop of vanilla ice cream melting over the top is traditional. Here the topping is so popular that I make double or triple batches of it and give our cobbler a bottom as well.
Addendum the first: If you're feeling a little more ambitious, try jam. It's not difficult, and you won't need a pressure cooker to process it. Any decent canning site has recipes.
Addendum the second: Wild blueberries are also in season in the foothills, and should be through the beginning of October. More travel and lower yields for a similar amount of work, but they'll beat out anything you can grow or buy, and they're less bloodthirsty than blackberry vines.